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In The Cave , the first of their two stage works, composer Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot attempt to shed new light, via an innovative multimedia installation, on the relationship between words and music, a central concern in opera. While Reich appropriates speech melodies for musical purposes, Korot focuses on the graphic properties of alphabetic writing; both pay close attention to details of typography or intonation, which leads them to explore new modes of lyricism arising not from the characters’ subjective responses to the plot, but from the experience of language as such.